illustrations

If you’re feeling Gothic in 2017, you’ll have an extra month to visit ZSR’s classic works of Gothic lit like The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, and Dracula. The ZSR Special Collections exhibit Deep Into that Darkness Peering has been extended until March 1. Stop by Special Collections & Archives (ZSR 625) any time during our... more ›

Inspired by the recent popularity of coloring books for grownups, the New York Academy of Medicine is sponsoring Color Our Collections week. Libraries all over the country — including ZSR Special Collections & Archives — are offering free, printable scans of their illustrated materials for your coloring pleasure. ZSR’s coloring pages are available in a #ColorOurCollections... more ›

If you were a holiday shopper in the 1830s, one item on your list might well have been an annual gift book—an anthology of illustrations, poems, stories, and essays, in an affordable but decorative binding. Several examples of 19th century holiday gift books are now on exhibit in the ZSR Library Special Collections & Archives... more ›

American artist Rockwell Kent spent Christmas 1918 in a small cabin on an island off the south coast of Alaska. More than twenty years later he recalled the experience in words and woodcut illustrations in a holiday gift book titled A Northern Christmas. The small book was published by the American Artists Group, an organization... more ›

The Encyclopédie; ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers is a 28-volume monument to the French Enlightenment, combining a wealth of information about all aspects of human thought and achievement with a subversive attack on the stifling old regime of religion, classical tradition, and superstition. Many hands contributed to the Encyclopedie, but the... more ›

Ethiopia, the oldest independent nation in Africa, has a unique Christian tradition dating back to the 4th century. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church developed largely in isolation after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 640’s. But Christianity remained the official state religion for many centuries, and the Ethiopian imperial family claimed to be descended directly... more ›

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) is now best known as portrait painter of some of the most famous figures of Renaissance Europe, including Erasmus, Thomas More, and King Henry VIII of England. But as a young artist in his native Basel, Holbein also worked as an illustrator, producing drawings that would be reproduced in woodcuts... more ›